As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
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Sunday, 28 July 2013

‘Raylan’ by Elmore Leonard

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 7
February 2013. ISBN: 978-1-7802-2230-1

This book is based on the Emmy
award-winning TV series Justified, Raylan by Elmore Leonard. Raylan
Givens is a US Federal Marshal whose job is arresting fugitive felons. Givens
is essentially an old-fashioned hero from Wild West stories who enforces the
law, is never first to draw his gun, but when he does shoot shoots to kill.

The story is set in Kentucky
hillbilly country and is (or appears to be) a compilation of three episodes of
the TV series all featuring female lawbreakers. In the first story Layla, a
nurse with experience of transplant operations, and her lover Cuba Franks
kidnap people and remove their kidneys for sale to hospitals. In the second,
Carol Conlan, ruthless executive of a strip coal mining company, coldbloodedly
shoots the elderly retired miner Otis Culpepper who has resisted the pollution
caused by the mining company’s activities and
then orders one of her subordinates to take the blame and plead self-defence.
In the third, Givens is searching for a young woman gambler, Jackie Nevada,
whom Givens believes is also one of three girls carrying out bank robberies
organised by a criminal called Delroy Lewis.

These stories are told as one with links provided not only by Givens but
also by other characters who make appearances in one or another of the stories:
the crafty elderly Pervis Crowe, a large-scale marijuana farmer, whose
bone-headed sons are involved with Layla’s and Cuba’s schemes, makes an appearance in the second story
when he refuses to sell his land to Carol Conlan’s mining company. Jackie Nevada while on the road is taken up by Harry
Burgoyne for whom Cuba Franks had worked at one time. And Carol’s shooting by Marion Culpepper, widow of the murdered
Otis, occurs in the second and third stories.

There is so much in Leonard’s writing to admire
such as his terse and laconic prose style and his use of dialogue to illuminate
character: his famous 10 Rules of Writing should be required reading for
crime writers. But in my view this adaptation of episodes of the TV series is
not particularly successful at least for readers who do not know the series. It
gives the impression of incoherence. It might have been less confusing if the stories
had been told as three separate narratives with interlocking strands. Readers
who already know Leonard’s work will like Raylan
but it would be better for readers who have not previously read any of
Leonard’s novels to begin with titles
such as Get Shorty and Maximum Bob.

------

Reviewer: Radmila May

Elmore Leonard was
born in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 11, 1925. His father
worked as an executive for General Motors Corporation, and from 1927 to 1934,
Leonard, his parents and older sister, Margaret, moved several times to Dallas, Oklahoma City and
Memphis before finally settling in Detroit in 1934.

In the fifth grade, in 1935, Leonard showed the first sign of wanting to write
fiction. He wrote a play inspired by the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, recently serialized in a Detroit newspaper; though
it was the 1930 film version he recalls more vividly. He staged the play in the
classroom, using desks as the barbed wire of no man’s land. In 1943, at the age
of 17, Leonard graduated from The University of Detroit High School, and tried
to join the Marines, but was rejected because of poor vision. He was
subsequently drafted and assigned to the Seabees, the fighting construction
battalion of the United States Navy. He served for a little more than a year
and a half in the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines before returning home
in January of 1946. Leonard enrolled in the University of Detroit
and majored in English and Philosophy. In 1947, Elmore Leonard’s father left
General Motors and bought an auto dealership in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Upon graduation, Leonard planned to work for him, but his father died of a
heart attack six months after the move to New Mexico, ending any thoughts he might
have had of selling automobiles.

He married Beverly Cline in 1949
and went to work for the Campbell Ewald advertising agency. He soon became an
ad writer but wrote Western stories on the side, selling mostly to pulp
magazines, and to men’s magazines like Argosy, and one story to the Saturday
Evening Post. In 1961, Leonard quit his job at the ad agency to write full time.
It would be a long, but clearly marked, road to success. Leonard began selling
his work to Hollywood
on a regular basis. Leonard’s books were now getting glowing reviews. He grew
in stature and turned out well-received novels such as Freaky Deaky, Killshot,
Maximum Bob and his “Hollywood” book, Get Shorty, which in 1995 was made into
a hit movie by Barry Sonnenfeld and catapulted him to even greater fame. In
2005, at the age of 80, he wrote his fortieth novel, The Hot Kid, featuring his iconic marshal, Carl Webster, receiving
some of the best reviews of his long career. That same year, he received the
prestigious Cartier’s Diamond Dagger Award in England
and The Raymond Chandler Award at the Noir in Festival in Courmayeur, Italy.
More awards followed: The F. Scott Fitzgerald award in 2008; the PEN USA
Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. In 2008, Elmore’s son, Peter Leonard,
published his first novel, Quiver, and father and son began doing bookstore
appearances and book festivals together. It has been a satisfying
experience for Elmore to share the stage with his son. He’s happy that
writing has turned into a family business.

In late 2010, Djibouti
was published; a fun romp through the world of Somali pirates and home grown Al
Qaeda terrorists, seen through the eyes of a documentary filmmaker.

Today, inspired by Justified, based on his novella, Fire in the Hole (2000), Elmore wrote
his 45th novel, Raylan. Parts
of this novel have been incorporated into the second and third season of Justified. “I can pick up Raylan’s
story anywhere,” Elmore said. It’s like visiting with an old friend.”

Elmore Leonard lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.
He has five children, twelve grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

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About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.